A Stylometric Investigation of Linguistic Styles Based on a Vietnamese Corpus

Abstract

The role of stylometric methods in linguistics has received increased attention across a number of disciplines in recent years, particularly in forensic linguistics. This study assesses the value of correspondence analysis, a stylometric method, in Vietnamese text analysis. Based on a dataset extracted from VVC (VnExpress Viewpoint Corpus), a 1.3-million-token corpus of Vietnamese opinion articles, linguistic features examined are seven parts-of-speech features to seek relational features characterizing authorial styles. Our focus in the analysis is on feature effects, with the aim to shed light on whether linguistic features of writing styles are consistent across various genders and professions. Seven features altogether produce encouraging results to what is acknowledged to be a difficult problem for Vietnamese language. In addition, we find that when using correspondence analysis for seven linguistic features in the dataset based on authors’ gender, conjunctions and verbs perform best. Regarding authors’ profession, conjunctions and pronouns offer a striking improvement on stylometric investigation. The discriminating ability was particularly impressive, suggesting that, in a collective sense, parts-of-speech features provide a good set of markers.